Ellen Winner

Introduction

Ellen Winner is an American cognitive developmental psychologist who has spent fifty years studying two subjects that psychology has mostly treated as marginal: how people understand art, and what it means to be a gifted child. She is best known outside academia for an unpopular conclusion — that the case for arts education cannot rest on the claim that it raises test scores, because the evidence for that claim does not exist.

That position made her an awkward figure in her own field. Arts advocates wanted ammunition; Winner kept pointing out that the ammunition was blanks. Her argument was not that the arts are worthless but that the standard justification offered for them is unsupported, and that they should be defended on their own terms.

Early Life and Education

Winner graduated from the Putney School in 1965 and completed a doctorate in developmental psychology at Harvard in 1978. She has been associated with Harvard's Project Zero since 1973, first as a researcher and now as a senior research associate, and it was there that her intellectual direction was set — Project Zero, founded by Nelson Goodman and later home to Howard Gardner, was one of the few places in the 1970s where the arts were treated as a serious object of cognitive research.

Academic and Professional Career

Winner joined Boston College as a professor of psychology, chaired the department, and directed the Arts and Mind Lab; she is now professor emerita of psychology there. She has been a Project Zero researcher since 1973 and has authored more than 200 articles and chapters.

Her institutional work shaped arts education practice as much as her research did. She edited the Arts PROPEL handbooks, a curriculum and assessment framework built on the idea that artistic work involves perception, production and reflection in a continuous loop; she was principal investigator of the Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP), which reviewed the evidence on arts education and academic outcomes; and with Lois Hetland and others she developed Studio Thinking, now in its third edition, which describes the habits of mind — studio habits — that visual arts classrooms cultivate.

She served as president of the American Psychological Association's Division 10 (Psychology and the Arts) in 1995–96, received the division's Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts in 2000, and is a fellow of Division 10 and of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Metaphor, irony and theory of mind

Winner's earliest research programme, much of it with Howard Gardner, asked how children learn to mean something other than what they say. Her work traced the development of metaphoric understanding, then of irony, and established that understanding irony requires a second-order mental state attribution: the child must grasp not only what the speaker believes but what the speaker intends the listener to believe about the speaker's belief. That finding turned out to have clinical reach — patients with right-hemisphere damage, who produce and comprehend literal language normally, were shown to have specific difficulty distinguishing lies from jokes and irony from deception, a demonstration that pragmatic interpretation is dissociable from propositional comprehension.

The psychology of the arts

Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts (1982) was one of the first systematic attempts to bring cognitive psychology to painting, music and literature, and it remains the standard statement of the case that art is a proper subject for psychological study rather than a decorative one. Her later How Art Works (2018) returned to the same question with four decades of evidence, and it takes on the puzzle she has described as central: the greatest works of art tend to elicit negative emotions — tragedy, dread, grief — and people seek them out anyway, apparently because the negative affect is accompanied by pleasure in beauty and by the making of meaning.

Giftedness and the rage to master

Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (1996) is the book she is most widely read for. Its method is to take the claims that surround gifted children and test them: that they are fragile, that they are well-rounded, that pushing children is the surest route to eminence, that gifted education is elitist. Winner's account of gifted children emphasises three traits — precocity, a drive to master a domain, and an attraction to complexity — and she has argued that the middle one, which she calls a "rage to master," is the closest thing to a defining feature: gifted children do not have to be made to practise, they have to be stopped.

The transfer question

The contribution with the widest policy impact is negative. Reviewing the literature with Lois Hetland, Winner concluded that the widely repeated claim that studying the arts improves academic achievement is not supported: the studies that appeared to show it were confounded, and where the confounds were controlled the effects disappeared. She published the argument in the Journal of Aesthetic Education in 2000 under a title that made the point unmistakably — "Mute Those Claims: No Evidence (Yet) for a Causal Link Between Arts Study and Academic Achievement" — and she later extended the review for the OECD as Art for Art's Sake? The Impact of Arts Education (2013, with Thalia Goldstein and Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin).

Her positive case, developed in the Studio Thinking books, is different: arts education cultivates habits of mind — observation, reflection, persistence, envisioning — and those are worth having on their own account, not as a route to higher mathematics scores.

Major Publications

Winner, E. (1982). Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts. Harvard University Press.
Winner, E. (1988). The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony. Harvard University Press.
Winner, E. (1996). Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. Basic Books.
Winner, E., & Hetland, L. (2000). "Mute those claims: No evidence (yet) for a causal link between arts study and academic achievement." Journal of Aesthetic Education, 34(3–4), 11–75.
Winner, E., Goldstein, T. R., & Vincent-Lancrin, S. (2013). Art for Art's Sake? The Impact of Arts Education. OECD Publishing.
Winner, E. (2018). How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration. Oxford University Press.
Winner, E. (2021). An Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse: Art Education from Colonial Times to a Promising Future. Oxford University Press.

Impact and Legacy

Winner's influence runs in three directions. She helped make empirical aesthetics and the psychology of the arts a legitimate research area with its own division, journal and conference community. She gave arts educators a vocabulary — studio habits of mind — that does not depend on the transfer claim. And she set a methodological standard in an area of education research that had operated largely on assertion.

The criticisms are as much political as scientific.

Her transfer scepticism has been contested on both sides. Glenn Schellenberg and others reported associations between music lessons and IQ in correlational and longitudinal samples, and argued that dismissing that evidence because it is not experimental throws away the only data the question permits; on that view, Winner's standard is unattainable and her conclusion overstated. Subsequent second-order meta-analyses of cognitive training have generally supported her position, finding that far transfer effects shrink toward zero once confounds are controlled — but the disagreement about what counts as adequate evidence in education research has not been resolved.

Arts advocates did not welcome the finding. This is the criticism that cost Winner the most goodwill. At a time when arts programmes were being cut, the strongest available political argument was that the arts raise achievement, and her review removed it. Critics argued that insisting on randomized designs in complex educational settings guarantees a null result, and that she had handed school boards a reason to cut. Winner's reply has been consistent: a justification that collapses under scrutiny is not a defence of anything.

Gifted education itself is contested, and she is its most prominent defender. The identification procedures Winner's work relies on are known to under-identify Black, Hispanic, low-income and English-learner students, and gifted programmes have been criticised as a mechanism of within-school segregation. Winner has acknowledged the identification problem while arguing for better identification rather than for dismantling provision. There is also a substantive theoretical disagreement: her emphasis on precocity and innate drive sits against the deliberate-practice account associated with K. Anders Ericsson, and she has been a persistent critic of the popular "10,000 hours" extrapolation, which she regards as a misreading of the original work.

The empirical base of the psychology of art is narrow. Like most of cognitive psychology, empirical aesthetics has drawn heavily on Western, educated samples and on the Western art canon, so claims about how "people" respond to art are claims about a small and unrepresentative population. The definition of art itself is not fixed across cultures or periods, which makes the object of study unstable in a way that the field rarely acknowledges.

Two points cut in Winner's favour and are worth noting. First, her conflict of interests runs against her own conclusions: a psychologist whose career is built on arts education has every incentive to find transfer effects, and she reported that she could not. Second, she has been willing to keep testing the claim — the OECD volume revisited the evidence rather than resting on the 2000 review. The result is a body of work whose central negative finding has held up better than most of the positive claims it displaced.

Learn More

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose work on creativity and flow covers adjacent ground
Thinking and reasoning, the cognitive territory her metaphor and irony research belongs to
Christopher Peterson, who asked the same question about character that she asks about artistic ability
Rena Subotnik — who reframes giftedness as developing expertise rather than a trait a child either has or lacks

References

Winner, E. (1996). Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. Basic Books.